The opening session of Pinchbeck's course Secret Histories and Spiritual Revolutions, on Hermeticism and the sources of Western esotericism. He introduces himself through Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (reissued as Quetzalcoatl Returns), How Soon Is Now and When Plants Dream, co-written with the anthropologist Sophia Rokhlin, and describes how paranormal experiences during indigenous initiations made a materialist position untenable and moved him toward analytic idealism. The lecture then takes up the prisca theologia, the claim of a single primordial revelation surviving in fragments across religions, quoting Antoine Faivre's definition of esotericism as the means of recovering it and noting that academic scholarship generally rejects the idea. He discusses Hermes Trismegistus, the Sefer Yetzirah, and the Hebrew alphabet's role for John Dee and Cornelius Agrippa.
In brief
- The prisca theologia posits an original truth given to humanity in antiquity, of which existing religions preserve only fragments.
- Antoine Faivre defines esotericism as the body of teachings that permit access to that primordial tradition or contribute to restoring it.
- Academic scholars of religion largely deny that any such unified truth exists apart from human construction, producing a lasting split with practitioners.
- Pinchbeck argues that psychic and paranormal experiences during shamanic initiations made the materialist paradigm impossible for him to maintain.
- The Sefer Yetzirah describes creation through thirty-two paths of wisdom, the ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
- Cornelius Agrippa held that the Hebrew letters originated close to the beginning of creation and therefore carried power to transmute reality.
Full text
Okay. So, welcome to Secret Histories and Spiritual Revolutions week one and um very excited to have you here and should dive into these topics. I thought I would start with a little bit about my background which I I assume that many of you know already. Uh I'm the author of a number of books. Uh my first book was Breaking Open the Head that came out in 2002. Um then in 2006 I released 2012 the return of pencil. um 2016 I suppose how soon is now came out and around 2020 I brought out wet when plants dream Iaska that was co-written with Sophia Rockan Rocklin a anthropologist and basically my first book breaking up with the head came out before the current psychedelic renaissance was in full gear and in fact at that point you really couldn't talk about psychedelics in sort of plight conversation plight company in New York or in the media world, people kind of laugh at you.
The the the psychedelics were still very taboo and and repressed and ridiculed. And um I thought I I sort of had got into a spiritual kind of crisis. I remembered my psychedelic experiences from when I was in college and younger and I decided to go back in and explore them again and then started learning about um boa and uh IA and so on. And so I ended up going to different indigenous cultures around the world going through their um initiations with them. And along the way, I had a number of sort of psychic, paranormal, supernatural experiences that were extremely challenging for me because I I come from a sort of skeptic, secular, materialist background and it was impossible for me to hold on to that, you know, paradigm.
So I suddenly had to begin to really think about different ways of understanding the nature of reality, understanding the world. And I found that what these shenanic cultures expressed with their ideas of these different levels of spiritual reality and animism and interconnectedness, interconnectedness and so on seemed more truthful to me. uh had to be more truthful than the flatout, you know, materialist worldview. And that kind of led me to the second book, 2012, which I've just republished as as Ketzel Codle returns, where I was looking seriously at the prophecies of indigenous cultures like the Hopi and the Maya, uh, the Aztecs, um, and so on. as well as looking at the apocalypse tradition in Judaism, Christianity and Islam and the Yuga cycles from Hinduism and so on and um yeah that book was very philosophical and I basically shifted fully to this perspective of monistic or analytic idealism.
I thought that uh we'll talk about a lot during this course but essentially the idea is that it sort of flips the materialist idea is that you know the physical universe the physical world is you know quote unquote real consciousness is an epipenomenon of physical evolution uh and kind of an accidental byproduct of evolution. The idealist idea is that consciousness which is actually the primary ground of all experience is also the primary ground of the universe and everything that happens happens within consciousness. The the material reality is a projection or in some ways an extension of consciousness and we are all in a way projections or disassociated temporarily dissociated aspects of of that underlying field of consciousness uh which is learning about itself uh through us. I thought and um yeah in that book I also looked at um you know the Mayan uh ideas around kind of a change in the world ages u in 2012 at the beginning of another 5,000 125 year cycle and I still think that that seems to be quite accurate when we look at what's happening ecologically geopolitically and technologically uh as well as what's happening in terms of uh you know sort of the evolution of consciousness uh the rediscovery of the world's esoteric traditions. So I I feel all of those are pointing towards a new a new model or a new paradigm or in some sense a new world.
Um the hope he talks about the shift from the fourth world to the fifth world. So that's still is always the background of my thinking. Um the shamanic and the sort of prophetic uh possibilities. Um yeah, I think those are the two books that we'll cover for now. We we could always talk about other stuff later. Uh also just to mention that I think I have a uh alchemist ancestor uh Christopher Pinch uh 1670 1732 uh who created an alloy of tin called pinchback gold. But he was also a maker of extremely complex flocks for the royal family and they often have like astrological contributes and so on.
Uh and then the word pinchback came to mean anything uh false or spurious counterfeit or fake. I don't know you could talk about a pinchback age of literature or pinchback age of culture or something like that. Uh so yeah that's always kind of like covered in my in my field that I had this ancestor who you know must have been trying to attain you know achieve the philosopher stone turn turn base metals into gold but he ended up with pinchback. Um, you know, one of the questions that I find very fascinating that I want to think about and reflect on and try to address with this course is this notion of a Prrisca the theologia. Uh, the idea that there's a kind of underlying truth, a single truth theology that exists in all religions that it was given by the all or the one or God to man in in distant antiquity.
uh and are we're meant to kind of re re recover and restore that. Uh uh Antoine Fav who I'm probably going to massacre a lot of pronunciations that's just the way it is. um he's a French writer on oultism and academic and he notes uh the existence of primordial tradition is posited of which the various traditions and religions spread throughout the world would be only fragmented and more or less authentic pieces here esotericism is the teaching of the ways that would permit attaining knowledge of this tradition or contributing to restore it. So you have uh definitely a sort of dichotomy in scholarship uh around these topics whereas people who are part of the traditional academy is completely disbelieve that there is such a thing as a prriska theologia or some united truth that isn't just a human-made construct. Um uh so yeah so this this question of is there some form of unbroken hermetic tradition that can be recaptured rediscovered um made use of again in a sense this was from the Sienna the floor of the Sienna cathedral.
This is Hermes Troscus who was uh you know very popular in in the Renaissance. Uh so uh Wter Hanigraph uh uh one of the you know kind of most important contemporary occult academic scholars um in his book uh on the medit guide for the perplexed talk about how western esotericism is the academyy's dust bin of rejected knowledge and I think it's really the case that um occultism esotericism really became like the the repressed other of modernity uh you know from the enlightenment until today. Western esotericism is a modern scholarly construct not an autonomous tradition that already existed out there merely needed to be discovered by historians. And this guy Paul Clydemon Monad uh also very interesting contemporary academic scholar uh reinforces this uh sort of negative idea around there being like a true philosophy you know underlying uh the agelessness of the occult turns out to be an illusion or in many cases a mystification because it's adherence made such efforts to disguise its recent origins. It seems doubtful that much of the commercialized oultism of today can be traced back beyond the late 19th century.
Yeah. I mean I have a um I guess in a way an advantage over these people in that I had which I sort of wrote about recently in in in the newsletter you know some very profound kind of occult experiences that through you know psychedelics you know where where you know I was with a friend we both had shared this experience of these beings kind of surrounding us that really did feel like something from the sort of Crowley universe um and you know number of experiences just made me take this idea of these uh these sort of realms of diamonds or astral beings uh as um you know a much more serious thing. So but then you have somebody like Martin Booth who wrote this wonderful book secret history of the world which he claims is a kind of recapitulation of the ancient knowledge from the mystery schools. And he argues that an ancient and secret philosophy that originated in the mystery schools was preserved and nurtured down the ages through the medium of secret societies including the Knights Templar and the Rosie Prusian. Sometimes this philosophy has been hidden from the public and at other times it has been placed in plain view though always in such a way as to remain unrecognized by outsiders.
A lot of Booth's book is informed by um I would say Rudolfph Steiner as his core source for his view of like these sort of uh previous incarnational worlds in which humanity lived or different kind of um levels of consciousness and so on. But I think we'll we'll get to that in in a in a later uh session. Uh and yeah, I wanted to step back and sort of think about, you know, why is the you know, worldview relevant now? Um, and I think, you know, on on a on a larger level, we're seeing, you know, a slow but steady but also kind of um ultimately inevitable transition from, you know, reductive materialism mechanism to either something like analytic idealism or maybe pansychism. Um, and that is a huge gamecher.
I mean, basically, if you look at what quantum physics has been revealing, uh, the the 2022 prize went for these experiments that prove the universe is quote unquote not locally real. Um, that consciousness is a major factor in in in what, you know, emerges and manifests. Um, then we also have the sort of primary data that many many people are experiencing through the revival of psychedelics and the second reformation in a sense. Uh this idea of the second reformation is one that I really like a lot. It's from this guy Tom Roberts who wrote a book called the psychedelic future of the mind and Roberts argues that um you know the first reformation was when the Bible was translated into the common languages by Martin Luther and suddenly the you know the people in the world could have access to the word of God and the visions of the prophets and so on.
Uh and this led to massive social change. uh for instance it led to the English civil war and was a major factor in a lot of people believing that you know the and you know the the the book of revelation was being played out in their time now they can read it for themselves. So for Roberts, he understands that the second reformation is what we're in now, which is where not only can we read the word of God and and and read about these visions of the prophets, we can directly have those experiences for ourselves uh through enthogens through through psychedelics. Um so I think that's super super fascinating democratization of the visionary experience. Uh so yeah, so I would argue I like to use a term I think that young liked that we're in an an antiodroia kind of a polarity shift a new paradigm and it's maybe not happening as fast as we would all like but maybe it's only happening the only way it could happen because you have very entrenched uh institutions and elites andmies that are deeply invested in the uh materialist uh reductive materialist paradigm and then on the other hand you have religious fundamental fundamentalists fanatics, evangelicals who have a very crude, you know, view of spirituality and the religion, the religious aspects of existence.
And I'm I'm really interested. I've been having a sort of difficult argument in the comments of my newsletter um around this question of, you know, the alchemical project and technology, which is something that Terrence Mc Kenna explored a lot. uh whether our technological projections are in some sense a continuation of the sort of alchemical project, whether we are searching for the philosopher stone in silicon and biotech and ntotech uh and how does this relate to all these other very threatening things that we see happening around us like the uh biospheric crisis. Uh I mean another reason why I feel that this hermetic worldview is so so relevant is like a lot of it is about how to summon spirits, angels, demons, how to work with other forms of consciousness or intelligence in the universe. And we seem to be engaged in a kind of a cult summoning uh through our technology of a super intelligent being you know which somebody like Snider might have referred to as Aram.
Um so yeah this is something I think would be very interesting to to explore in in in more depth in the course. Um and then as I mentioned um you know in in the course material you know there's been a huge focus on eastern mysticism yoga Tibetan Buddhism and so on big focus on indigenous shamanism IA but still it feels in the sort of new consciousness culture uh there is a kind of avoidance of the western esoteric tradition and I think that's because of the baggage of Christianity um the the negativity that that sort you know, intellectual people who've grown into a materialist culture. It's sort of easier for us to then adopt um a philosophy that's very different uh than than our than our history really. uh um so I mentioned analytic idealism uh and the most impressive kind of um express you know person giving expression to this philosophy right now is Bernardo Castrop who's written all these wonderful books including um why materialism is baloney uh and he also has a uh foundation putting out a lot of videos of his works I really recommend getting acquainted with his ideas I think he's really uh helpful uh but you know He he proposes that we're living in a in a mind before matter universe that the physical world is in some sense like a dream that is a projection of this underlying field of consciousness and sort of instinctive unitary consciousness that can only kind of um encounter itself know itself become creative through you know building a a world or universe in which there are kind of individuated consciousness kind of receptacles who can then have you know certain level of free will and and decision-m uh cast notes that reductive materialism doesn't mesh with our most basic experience of reality or with our the recent discoveries in quantum physics. Uh and another thing I think it's um more than allegory is one of his books.
Uh but he talks about how you know if the universe is indeed the projection of a distinctive unitary consciousness or field of consciousness then we fully have the right to interpret aspects of our world as the ancients did as part of a myth or allegory or mythological structure or or dream that we're participating in. Um so that is very fascinating. In fact, Rudolfph Snder wrote his first book was called Philosophy of Freedom and it was his reputation of canian dualism and uh his kind of like putting forth of a monistic idealistic perspective that was just too outside of the um the bounds of his time to be taken seriously in the in the traditional philosophy context. he sort of had to create his own movement of people already interested in occultism, you know, mediumship, the visionary experience and so on. Um, and yeah, it's like seems like a lot of parallels between quantum physics and hermeticism.
We look at the philosophy of correspondence from hermeticism and quantum entanglement. how um the basic principle of as above so below suggests that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm and vice versa. Um you know we're seeing the entanglement of subatomic particles that move instantly even across you know vast distances they maintain connection. So this idea of a unitary kind of dimension of oneness um you know is is is also being revealed by quantum physics. uh in hermeticism it is believed that the mind and consciousness play a central role in shaping reality. Uh and it's like you know the the capacity of the the the you know the magician's will and intellect uh using uh language um number um you know ritual uh can kind of work through the uh you know celestial and astral and natural forces to bring about transformation.
And similarly quantum physics is showing us that the act of observation affects the outcome of experiments at the quantum level. Uh the holographic principle which resonates with the hermetic concept that the material world is a reflection of higher spiritual claims. It's possible our threedimensional universe is a projection of some higher dimensional reality and um yeah and then non-locality which challenges the classical concept of causality and supports the vermetic thesis that we actually live in a deeply interconnected uh reality. Just to go a little bit deeper to the holographic universe idea I'm sure many people are familiar with it with David Bow and Michael Talbert's fascinating book the holographic universe. uh Bow was a major quantum physicist and he became convinced that the universe actually was functioning as a gigantic hologram.
Um uh Bow wrote we've seen that in the quantum context the ordered every immediately perceptible aspect of the world is to be regarded as coming out of a more comprehensive implicate order in which all aspects ultimately merge the undefinable immeasurable hollow movement. Um yeah so so the there's an implicate and an explicate order um and a kind of unfolding uh from the implicate order. Um um and then I think it's interesting to think about um and I think we'll probably keep coming back to this over the course kind of how um eastern mysticism and western medicism esotericism are different. I mean they're not completely different but they really do have very different emphases. Um I think one of the main differences is in the western tradition we are more focused on this idea of an evolutionary cosmos a cosmos that's undergoing change and transformation and um the eastern view is more of a static cosmos.
um you know like the um the BTO states like uh you know this sort of um endless wheel that's turning um you know people like Steiner and um other people in these traditions Theosophy and so on envision you know a universe that's transitioning from you know kind of uh one state of being to another state of being that humanity is evolving new capacities that ultimately uh we may live in very different ways with different sensory organs maybe not as physical. Steiner talks about the development of the spirit self as kind of a new body uh that humanity was developing right now. uh and um yeah and so so similarly there's a different emphasis uh in um Buddhism uh there's a the idea of nirvana um so there's a kind of annihilation of of the individual self um as completely elucery uh and in the western tradition it's a little bit more of an exultation of the individual self I mean there's still the all the absolute the godhead but the the individual has the capacity you through the hermetic work to kind of rise up to to to to that level of of um of the godhead. Uh so yeah, we'll look at ancient wisdom, religion, occultism, and magic. Uh so yeah, I think a lot of like um you know, particularly that sort of weird like 19th early 20th century kind of elephus levy like Crowley kind of vibe.
It feels very like Babylonian or or or Chaldian or something like they were beaming into a lot of the sort of origin of of Western ritual magic seems like it comes from that kind of like near east region you know the contemporary Iraq um you know Chaldian magic was the precursor of European medieval magic the ceremonial magic is practiced in the middle ages owed much to that of Babylon there's a similarity between the systems shown by the introduction to medieval magic of the names of abalone Ian and Assyrian gods and magicians, Beaselbub, Ishtar, Bal, Malik. Uh, and then there all these different strains in of magic that were practiced in ancient Iraq in Babylon and then were kind of like um re kind of uh revived and explored again uh in the early Renaissance. Um, demonic magic, astral magic, natural magic, talismanic magic, words of power and so on. Um, and I like this quote from 1917 from a scholar named Lewis Spence. There appears a deeper gloom, a more ominous spirit of the ancient of the on the obscure and the magic of old Mesopotamia than than that of any other land.
Its mighty sanctuaries and sky aspiring towers seem founded upon this belief in the efficacy of the spoken spell, the reiterated invocation. Thousands of spirits, various and grotesque, the parents of the ghosts and goblins of a latter day, haunt the pearls of the temple, demons with claw and talon, vampires, ghouls, all are there. Spirits, blessed and unbed, jin, witch hags, leours, sorrowing, unburied ghosts. So yeah, there's this sort of strange kind of I don't know almost like slightly primitive or like barbaric quality to this sort of Babylonian magic which I think you definitely still feel you know in Crowley and so on. Uh Egyptian book of the dead probably many people here know about that uh focus on the afterlife journey.
Uh so a lot of Egyptian practice was focused on the you know the death and and the afterlife. um uh to uh ensure a successful journey for the dead to the very stage of the afterlife. Uh the deceased heart would be weighed against the feather of M, the goddess of truth and justice, who I believe was Thoth's wife. Uh and if there was a successful judgment, if the heart is found to be lighter than the feather, the deceased is allowed to move on to the afterlife. Failed judgment. If the heart is heavier than the feather, it will be devoured by a demon with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the hind quarters of hippopotamus resulting in the second death and oblivion.
Uh so yeah, so if if you're facing obliv and it's quite interesting actually to think about all the different kind of afterlife uh ideas. Um and we'll get into that more but particularly if we take sort of quantum uh the quantum reality into account and morphetic fields and so on like are these cultures you know by creating these kind of like egregores of gods and afterles are are are they somehow causing effects that that that go beyond personal death? um does does the you know the the human consciousness in in a in a focused collective shape uh what gets experienced uh after death and whether it's you know whether there's some form of venom psychosis or reincarnation or whether it's some form of oblivion or like Hades uh I think it's an interesting thing to to to consider. Uh personally I'm a I'm quite a big believer in reincarnation. Um, you know, I think there's a lot of good evidence for it.
I recommend the work of Ian Stevenson who's a professor at the University of Virginia. Uh, he wrote a number of books on the topic. He wrote a 2500page book called Where Biology and Reincarnation Intersect. And he found children all around the world who had spontaneous recall of their past lives. And often he would bring the children to the families that they remembered being from a sense of a kind of reunion or reconciliation. Uh sometimes the children would have um birth marks like significant birth marks let's say on their neck. Uh and it would turn out that they had the last life had ended uh with a blow to the to to that spot or or or an accident.
And sometimes they would look at the autopsies or or photos or dig up dig up the bodies really be able to verify these connections. It's pretty extraordinary evidence for reincarnation. And um yeah, that's something we'll talk about more throughout the course. But uh I mean Rudolph Steiner uh who you know lived from 1865 to I think 1925. He said that the um one of the principal reasons for his reincarnation at that point in human history was to actually bring the knowledge of reincarnation back to the west that it had been lost uh with Judeo-Christian traditions, Christianity particularly and that the west needed to kind of restore that that that knowledge and understanding.
uh uh King Solomon from 10th century BC uh considered like a great astral magician who was able to bind demons and get them to work for him. Um built the first temple in Jerusalem. Uh there are a number of um grimoirs uh books of magic and also kind of books with all these sort of different demons you can conjure that have been attributed to him. uh the key of Solomon and lesser key of Solomon among them, but they're most likely from the Middle Ages from like the 14th century. Solomon allegedly possessed a magic ring called the seal of Solomon, which gave him power over the the spirits.
Um and um yeah, I guess he was incorporated into the Islamic tradition as Sullean and also seen as a very important figure uh in Islamic uh understanding. But once again, you sense that kind of like Babylonian kind of like influence. Uh and then in the classical world we had elus uh which lasted I thought it was actually longer than than thousand years. I thought it was more like 2,000 but at least from 600 BC to 400 AD. and the uh the sort of elite of the um helenic world would gather in elus and undergo uh annual initiatory ritual involving pracphanany had potentially they all drank a potion called the kikon which may have been an enthiogen and um they were really sworn to secrecy on the point of death.
Um but yeah these um this kind of not only do they bind the classical world together for a thousand years um they also were very important for platonic uh thinking Plato's philosophy neoplatonism Cicero uh wrote as the rights are called initiation so in very truth we've learned from them the beginnings of life and gain the power not only live happily but also to die with a better hope um py py pythagoras um I you know I I'd sort of heard about him as being like sort of a shaman archetype. Uh kind of like a uh worker of miracles. He could billocate. Uh he could um hear the music of the spheres. He had the gift of prophecy.
He could sometimes control the weather or other natural forces. Uh and um obviously he created the Pythagorian theorems in mathematics. He contributed to philosophy. He discovered the uh uh mathematical relationship between musical intervals. Um and he also believed in some form of reincarnation or transmigration of souls. He believed the soul is immortal and that after death it moves to a new body. Uh he had a a school initiatory school with a lot of followers. he became kind of a political force and ultimately one of his students who he'd uh finally um I guess vanished from the school uh reached a position of political power and attacked and uh burned down the uh school and killed him and um but uh yeah he was a very important uh figure for the neoplatists and u u and um there you have it.
uh his pupils were vegetarian, lived communally and they observed a code of silence called esimethia. Uh and then laid out I guess his most kind of magical or sort of esoteric text is Tus which is pretty hard to grasp um in that it it sort of feels very like all over the place and um it's almost like you know you can sense that scholars are almost like embarrassed around about it. Um but I guess if you you know sort of reduce some of the cosmology in there uh Plato has this idea of the demier for him that's a positive being uh who create sort of the divine craftsman who used eternal forms mathematics geometry as a blueprint fashion the world uh based in order and harmony and uh Plato talked about the four elements as the building blocks of the cosmos. He talked about the world soul and immaterial and divine substance that permeates the cosmos providing it with life, intelligence and harmony. Uh he discussed the formation of celestial bodies such as the stars, planets and the earth as part of the ordered structure of the universe.
The demiurge creates the immortals the gods who in turn create mortal creatures such as humans. Uh toeas also there was a theory of metamsychosis or reincarnation. Human souls are reborn into different bodies after death depending on their actions during their previous lives. And Plato also introduces Atlantis as a powerful advanced civilization that fell out of favor with the gods and was destroyed. Uh so yeah, I mean what you find in Plato are all these like crazy kind of ideas which in some ways remind me of some of Rudolfph Steiner's kind of thinking by analogy or something. uh like at one point he talks about how the race of birds was created out of innocent like-minded men who thought to pursue the study of the heavens by sight.
These were transformed into birds and grew feathers instead of hair. I mean it's like a beautiful almost like childlike naive conception of how things occurred. Um one of the scholars writing on notes um the great source of error and also the meaning of truth to the Socratics was reasoning from analogy. They could see resemblances but not differences. They were incapable of distinguishing illustration from argument. Analogy in modern times only points the way and is immediately verified by experiment. The dreams and visions which pass through the philosopher's mind of resemblances between different masses of substances between the animal and vegetable world are put into the refiner's fire and the dross and other elements which adhere to them are purged away.
The contemporary of Plato and Socrates was incapable of resisting the power of any analogy which occurred to them and was drawn into any consequences which seemed to follow such as the idea that birds were created from the you know innocent like-minded men whose uh philosophy led them to just become birds and grow feathers instead of hair. I do love it though. Uh okay. So um you know Atlantis I'm sort of just bookmarking this year. I'm glad that David brought it up. We'll come back to it later. Um in critias later also talks about Atlantis. But at a later time there occurred pretentious earthquakes and floods and one grievous day at night befell them when the whole body of your warriors was sought up by the earth.
The island of Atlantis and like manner was swallowed by the sea and vanished. Um, I mean, a lively subject of discussion would be, uh, Graeme Hancock's recent series, I mean, uh, Ancient Apocalypse, uh, which I have to admit I was, uh, very, very disappointed by, and I've known Graeme for a long time and and like him very much personally. But um I ended up feeling that um whether consciously or not it was kind of like a grift like the the evidence for what he was proposing was so thin and um the way he portrayed himself as a sort of victimized agent of truth and kind of put down the archaeologists who um you know would love to make these kind of like fantastic discoveries. Um uh I don't know it just it just felt very disingenuous to me and I was very very sad by it. Uh because I did find some of Graham's work like the sign of the seal about the ark of the covenant I believe was his first book.
I think it's quite fascinating and I also did use uh fingerprints of the gods was fascinating to me when I was writing the 2012 book as he he he argued that many ancient cultures foresaw this um cataclysmic you know cat catastrophic event happening uh at or around 2012. Uh and you know in some ways that is possible. We we certainly in terms of what's happening ecologically we we do seem to be unleashing you know we don't need like an asteroid or anything. We're unleashing our own uh catastrophe and I think it is possible that a lot of these ancient civilizations did have some kind of prophetic for fornowledge around this which we can also talk about later. Uh so the Chaldian oracles around the first century AD.
Uh so this was in the Babylon Persian Gulf region. Uh the Chaldian oracles were called the Bible of the Neoplatus. They just survive in fragments. They brought together helenistic gnostic Babylonian Seemetic ideas and they were given in trance to sage Julian theist. Uh the was a set of practices for contacting the gods, sometimes being possessed by the gods, going to trans states. Um I just looked a little bit at the Chaldian oracles. it. I would love to actually that's one of the many pieces of the puzzle I'd like to go back and spend more time with. It's just I find something very beautiful about these ancient texts actually.
These are just a few quotes from it. Uh for the first transcendent fire does not enclose its own power in matter by means of works but by intellect. For intellect derived from intellect is the craftsman of the fiery cosmos. uh where the father perfected all things and handed them over to the second intellect which you the entire human race called the first intellect. Um so yeah this idea of like the divine mind the the noose um in Greek uh is is a core concept you find in this um early classical thought uh mystical religious theoric and magical approaches to reality. Uh obviously then you have the corpus hermetic uh that are thought to be from the first and second century AD but were attributed to the ancient Egyptian sage Hermesus who was said to live in the time of Moses and um but they've never found any basis for that.
It's quite possible they were written in the first and second century AD. Um there was a there was a kind of a tendency back uh for many many centuries where it wasn't exactly forgery but it was more like um kind of people sort of getting into the states of these like ancient you know figures or that they sort of envisioned or imagined and then maybe actually really believing that what they were putting out was you know the the original source text from these ancient beings. We see that in like the Zohar also in Jewish mysticism and so on. uh the philosophical focus of the corpus was on the relationship between the divine and the human and the spiritual transformation of the individual. It emphasizes the importance of attaining nosis or divine knowledge to achieve unity with the divine.
Uh and yeah, we'll we'll talk about this a little bit more later, but uh so essentially like a lot of these uh classical texts, I guess when you had the dark agents, uh a lot of a lot of the knowledge vanished from Italy, from Rome, from Europe, but luckily the Arab scholars picked it up and there was like the library in Alexandria and so on. So a lot of the uh esoteric knowledge ended up in the Arab world. Uh then when the um Constantinople was sacked in like the 10th century and the the Arab world began to break apart um scholars would sort of take these manuscripts and and bring them back west to to to Europe to Rome and so on and to Greece and um would h would hire would would buy the manuscripts then he had Marcelo FCO translate them. So uh fio translated the corpus hermeticum and that was really a big inspiration for the hermetic cabalistic movements in the early renaissance. Uh it's just again this idea of the noose uh the divine mind.
According to hermetic doctrine the universe was created by a supreme being called the one or the all the source of wisdom power and existence. Noose is an aspect or emanation of the one representing divine intellect and creative power. Human beings are thought to possess a divine spark within them which is their own inner noose. So we have a tiny spark of this divine noose that we can that we can spark up in a way by attuning ourselves to this divine intellect. Hermetic practitioners believe they can gain access to divine wisdom, achieve spiritual enlightenment and ultimately transcend uh the material world. Uh this quote is my favorite quote from the corpus hermetic.
uh it's from the uh dialogue with Handre uh who I guess is sort of this divine intellect speaking to to a human. Uh and he says um then if you not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God for like is known by like lead clear of all that is corporeal and make yourself grow to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure. Rise above all time become eternal. Then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible. Deem that you too are immortal, that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science.
Find your home in the haunts of every living creature. Make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths. Bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity. Think that you are everywhere at once on land, at sea, and heaven. Think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave. Grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together, then you can apprehend God. So the idea is that you know knowing God attaining you know spiritual realization is is is you know involves the whole being the soul but certainly is also involves the the noose the intellect uh making this this huge leap of identifying with with with the all in a way.
Um um yeah. So then you have this strange composite figure of Hermes Test Tmesticus uh who brings together Thoth from Egypt and Hermes from Greece. Um uh messenger god of magic, themes, language, alchemy. Thoth was the Egyptian god of philosophy, language, magic, who with his wife Matt judged the dead on the moon, uh putting the the the hearts on the feather, measuring them against the feather. Antoan fame says according to the Arab tradition his life is simultaneously physical and transtemporal after the example of Elijah's and even in his body he manifests a state of eternity. So I I'm I'm fascinated by this. I feel this is very much like born in the sort of um kind of myth mythological uh worldview um as opposed to our kind of mechanistic uh worldview.
Uh that things can be both physical and transtemporal. Um that there the myths are events that you know never were and always are in a way in a way that they're more real. like the structuring archetypal elements like underlying uh real events or what we experience uh as events. I really recommend Patrick Harper's work on this topic um particularly uh the philosopher secret fire which is one of my favorite books and we'll probably talk about again later. Um so yeah so in this uh dialogue I've been having on my comments um you know sort of um this French philosopher wrote about the on a deadly desire for immortality concerning transhumanism and he noted that there seems to be this relationship between um the hermetic tradition and the Renaissance uh you know alchemy and the sort of transhumanist quest for immortality.
Um uh I think there's something to this and I don't at this point I don't quite know what to think about and I know for many people uh this idea I mean um you know Ray Kurszswwell who's a director at Google and wrote the singularity is near is now saying that we're about seven years away from um quote unquote biological physical immortality that our capacity to extend the lifespan is going to be you know accelerated to the point where every year of life that you that you you have you'll have you know more than a year's worth of uh you know treatments that will that will that will allow you to continue indefinitely. So it's essentially indefinite life because your biological you know existence could still be terminated um you know obviously by bomb or falling out of a window or accident or whatever. Um uh yes. So in this comment uh Jean Michelle Bezier says uh we may strive to register transhumanism in a vein of inspiration going back to the hermetic philosophy of Hermes Tris me Tris megasus. This mythical character of ancient Greco Egyptian antiquity and amalgam of her Hermes and Thoth combined knowledge and technology the same religion owned the alchemic instinct of the Renaissance and justified the quest for immortality that was nursed by it.
This religion born of hermeticism then encountered Christiannosticism and the belief that if the world might be corrupt, knowledge can play a redemptive role. It is said that this religion encouraged above all a magical mentality which we are not completely without even now. A mentality which leads us to entrust the key to the ultimate explanation of things to some kind of code. A numerical code for the disciples Pythagoras, an alphabetical code for the cabalists, anformational code for contemporaries of universal digitization, etc. Last but not least, hermetic philosophy awakens the religion that encourages the making of gods by essentially according immortality to humans themselves. So yeah, I guess I'm just, you know, rating this as as, you know, something to to explore in the course and problematize.
I mean um that's it's just very very interesting to me. And obviously Nata Terrence was was very interesting on this topic too. He saw very much the melding of alchemy and you know Silicon Valley and the technological quest for the ultimate artifact and so on. The Emerald Tablet um also I think from like well maybe first century AD uh I won't read the whole thing but yeah essentially um you know as above so so below and and this sort of like a bit of an alchemical formula um discovering this uh you know philosopher stone um which is you know it's very interesting this this sort of endlessly uh complex elaborate uh alchemical search uh for uh some physical corallet of this like spiritual vision uh that you know many of the greatest minds uh you know for many centuries were were obsessed with this quest and um super it's it's it's very fascinating Where did that archetype come from? And um uh yeah, because it doesn't it doesn't seem as if uh the philosopher stone, you know, in its traditional imagination was was ever achieved.
Um so just yeah, other other currents of ancient wisdom. You have the uh the cabalistic current, the the Sephra Yesera uh which talks about God creating the world using these 32 paths of wisdom, the 10 Sephra and the 22 elemental letters of the Hebrew alphabet which form the foundation of creation. uh from the first or Sephro and the spirit ru the living god of three primal elements in air water and fire that the element of air god engraved the 22 letters the sepharzer outlines the process of creation the manipulation of the Hebrew alphabet and the 10 sephra the divine attributes or emanations through which god interacts with the world so this will become extremely important to hermetic uh alchemists and and and magi uh like um Jonathan D and Cornelius Agrippa uh who we'll sort of see. Grippa really thought that that you know the Hebrew alphabet uh that these were like letters really formed closer to the beginning of creation and had the power to uh transmute uh reality in a deeper way. Um all right, I guess we'll stop there.
Feel free to uh write me comments, please uh use the discussion board, get to know each other. Um, and yeah, I'm super open if people have ideas of things that should be covered, uh, you know, within the parameters of the structure. And it was really great to share this with you and, um, appreciate the, uh, enthusiasm and good to see you too, ST just popped up. Uh, yeah. Um, all right. Thank you everybody.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.